Trauma is everywhere today. We wake up to it every morning with the news. In the popular Hollywood movie, Analyze This, we watch Robert Deniro, Mafia chieftain with panic attacks, discover the connection between his anxieties and witnessing his father's gangland-style execution as a boy. ‘It was my fault!’ he cathartically confesses to his psychiatrist, Dr Billy Crystal, who shares the mobster's trauma in the form of his own narcissistic, traumatising father. At this juncture in cultural history, we all understand the traumatic implications of such events, even without analytic training. Though we may wonder about ‘false memory syndrome’ or the secondary gain of self-proclaimed victims of trauma, our current sensibility inclines us to believe that there must be some merit to the victim's accusation. At the same time, we are left discomforted by the idea that the victim is automatically relieved, by virtue of status as victim, of all moral responsibility regarding his/her own actions and experience.

Ruth Leys, professor in the Humanities